Miguel Osuna’s grandly decaying storefront studio at 4th and Spring streets is a workshop, a think tank, a popular spot on the monthly downtown art walk and a place where skateboarders get exposed to the ’70s electronic sounds of Jean Michel Jarre—what he might be spinning on his trusty turntable. Much like his public/private space, Osuna seems comfortable working two different ways at once, more harmonious and connected than conflicted.

Born in Mazatlan, Mexico, Miguel studied and practiced architecture in Guadalajara before switching to fine art and moving to California. He has lived in downtown LA for 12 years and is very much a part of the burgeoning art landscape of the city.
He is best known for his epic landscape paintings that depict vividly colorful scenes witnessed from behind the wheel, in motion: lonely roads, cars on highways, urban architecture and signage, sculptural freeway overpasses. The blurred effect adds abstraction to the representational paintings to create a lost moment in time, a fragment of life that’s gone but preserves on canvas the residual emotional resonance. The work speaks perfectly to the SoCal experience (like Cathy Opie’s small but monumental photos of LA freeways being built) where seemingly all of life happens in cars. Based on images he snaps while driving, he works very quickly with oil paintings materializing in days. You can see his thought processes and inspirations in experiments and studies he has lying around the studio, ideas that will lead to new bodies of artwork. You can also sense his background in architecture in the formal sophistication of forms and structures that populate his canvases.

Miguel Osuma, Frequency Modulated, (detail) pencil on canvas, 2012, courtesy Garboushian Gallery

While his paintings are all about the external world, his other body of work is both abstract and existential. He calls this series “Spin,” and like his paintings, these works convey movement but rely on suggestion and motifs. He uses materials from his architecture practice (ballpoint pens, colored pencils, electric erasers) to explore internal and existential subjects, “a theoretical allusion to membranes and particles of energy, this is what I see when I think about the theory of quantum mechanics, that we are all made of particles that are spinning,” Osuna says. Some canvases are literally spun by a homeless assistant he employs part time while the artist drips his paint onto the surface to create an undulating circle. Others are built from fluid but randomly hand-drawn squiggly patterns of ballpoint ink or Prismacolor that cover huge expanses to form dense yet intricate, otherworldly compositions. Another group in this series is created by carefully dropping graphite dust or pigment onto resin while the piece is slowly spinning, the shape created by the centrifugal force, with more light-catching resin layered on top to create a dazzling surface for the organic design.

Like his work, Miguel is always in motion. He’s animated and excited about his next group of paintings for a November show at Garboushian Gallery in Beverly Hills. Currently, he is engineering a curved 35-foot landscape mural he’s painting for a lobby on Wilshire Boulevard and is also working on a commissioned “Spin” piece with his signature calligraphic membranes on many sheets of glass for a collector’s home. It’s impossible not to be inspired by visiting a space spinning with so much creative energy and charmed by the artist working happily in the eye of the storm.